Imaginary Landscape
RSS FeedLast year I was reading through a variety of industry writings and came upon the widely-held assertion that "less is more" when it comes to Web-based forms. Specifically, how requiring users to fill out many form fields results in less submissions.
However, I was unable to find any data to support this. It seemed like a fairly easy thing to test, so I decided to test it on our website.
At the time, the Imaginary Landscape contact form was 11-fields long. It was filled with fields that I did not need but instead just wanted. Fields like Fax Number and How Did You Hear About Us?, Street Address and so on.
So, I tamped down my marketing instinct to ask everything and looked at what was necessary within the context of a contact form.
This reduced the number of fields from 11 to 4.
I replaced the large with the small form and tracked the difference using Google Analytics. The results were interesting, if predictable, and fairly scientific. I wrote up the process as well as the results in a spiffy white paper and placed it on our website.
Fast forward to last week. Germany-based Web development magazine Smashing Magazine announced on their Twitter account that they were looking for content and if anyone had something that might be interesting to their audience would they please email it to them.
So I e-mailed the white paper. They didn't appear interested in publishing it in their magazine, however they offered to tweet it out as one of their many daily tweets about things Web related.
Last Friday morning, Smashing Magazine tweeted the following:
Fewer fields in a contact form
sharply increases conversions
- http://bit.ly/3lwPxQ
At the time, Smashing Magazine's Twitter account had 69,485 followers, which in itself was cool. Then the retweets started.
There have been 51 retweets, some with brief editorial comments. Some of my favorites include, "amen brotha" and "das sage ich meinenm chef schon so lange" which translates into something like, "I've been telling my boss this for years."
The retweets add another 18,981 combined followers, bringing the total to 88,466. Retweeters came from throughout the US as well as Venezuela, Belfast, Budapest, New Zealand, UK and Finland.
There has been a predictable spike in traffic to the case study page to the tune of 1,980% increase comparing the week prior to the week of the tweet.
So, in the span of a couple days and with about 20 minutes work, I've put relevant content along with Imaginary's name in front of a potential audience of nearly 90,000 people worldwide and brought many (many) people into our website.
Now, if they'd just fill out a contact form!
Updated 07/14/10 @ 10:42AM CDT by brian
Categories: Technology Web News
